Posts Tagged ‘multi-modal’

Customer Testimonials Make Everything Worth It!

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Rolling out the red carpets for our customers

We receive many testimonials from customers who love our cloud communications services.  With each testimonial, you realize just how lucky you are to be part of an organization that is consistently hitting the mark customer by customer and sustaining growth based on our 24/7 customer service, ease-of-use, proven ability to scale, and our breadth of technologies.

Today we received an email from a customer using Tropo’s Voice and SMS API for their mission critical “FlightRecordAir” (as in Black Box) product, an On-Air audio automation system, AirForce(tm).   Tropo forms the notification component of a broadcast transmitter remote control and monitoring program.  The program monitors power output, various temperatures, currents and voltages and if any points fall above or below “warning” or “danger” setpoint levels, the application uses Tropo to begin calling a list of engineers until it reaches someone that can acknowledge the alarm and take action. Similarly, lesser warnings generate SMS text messages that are sent to another call list, and Tropo’s simple scripting structure allowed them to use the same code to send text messages and place voice calls.  This use case demonstrates the power of Tropo’s multi-modal capabilities!

Below is the testimonial quote from the Founder of MacroMedia, Inc., Tim Valley:

“Tropo is the right choice for us because it offers 24/7 support, very high reliability and repeatability, extensive error and status logging, and the implementation was painless and fast.  Security is transparent yet bulletproof.  It only took a couple of hours (from sign-up to fully functional) to build a relatively complex system with branching, parameters, voice recognition, calling and SMS.  Our implementation uses PHP scripts, hosted on our own site, along with a Delphi front-end.  No libraries or binaries needed to be installed on the server.”

Please continue to keep your feedback coming in to us.  We appreciate all the you help us become.

Sincerely, Team Tropo

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Posted in applications, Multi-channel, SMS, Tropo | No Comments »

What is Multi-modal?

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

We’ve talked a bit about how text communications are on the rise, replacing a lot of the voice self service that companies have traditionally offered. Text doesn’t always replace voice, however. With platforms that can work over both voice and text, it’s possible for text to augment the voice channel.

Take the example of directory assistance. Back when I was a kid, you called directory assistance, gave a business name (to a real human!) and they gave you the phone number. You wrote down the number and gave the business a call. Over time, companies started offering a service where they’d transfer you to the number, letting you skip writing it down and dialing yourself. With mobile phones, this service became even more important, as you’re often calling for assistance when you can’t stop and write something down.

An issue sometimes arises, however, when the number is busy. Or you get disconnected and have to call back. Since you didn’t pick up the number from the directory assistance but were transferred by them, you end up having to call back, ask for the business again, and get transferred again.

Multi-modal to the rescue.

Imagine if your phone company didn’t just transfer you to the number, but also sent you a text message with the business name, number, and address. That’s a multimodal conversation. You start out communicating in one channel (voice) and end up finishing the conversation or getting supplementary information via another (text).

As an example of multimodal applications, I’ve updated our Tropo Local Search demo. If you call from a mobile phone and look up a restaurant, you’ll get a text message containing the contact information of the listing you selected. Give it a try by calling (415) 894-9965 and finding coffee, pizza, or some other type of food in your neighborhood. And of course, the code is available in our documentation or on Github.

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Posted in IM, Multi-channel, Samples, SMS, SourceCode | No Comments »